ISFODOSU researcher warns of the need to establish ethics for the use of AI in the educational field

Santo Domingo.- The research professor at the Salomé Ureña Higher Institute of Teacher Training, ISFODOSU, Dr. Edwin Santana-Soriano, offered interesting data and reflections in his conference “Beware of AI!: let’s talk about ethics, artificial intelligence and education”, stating that ethical education is needed to prepare students to face new situations. The speaker began his presentation by defining the concepts of education, ethics, morals, and artificial intelligence and highlighting the close relationship they have with each other.

“Education is a purely human activity that seeks to perfect the knowledge and actions of individuals to make them more intelligent, while ethics is the branch of philosophy where life in coexistence is looked at, with the aim of ensuring that the interactions of individuals with the environment and others always tend towards good,” Santana affirmed.

He added that morality, through behaviors and actions, governs individuals in a specific social group and Artificial Intelligence, AI, is a multidisciplinary field of study to create machines and imitate intelligent human activities, through the disciplines of mathematics, logic, and neuroscience. With this premise, Soriano highlighted that planning, learning, reasoning, perception, and interaction are tasks that AI uses, but it does not have consciousness or self-awareness, emotions, or genuine creativity, and that is where teachers and students play a primary role. For the professor, the close relationship between education and AI lies in seeking improvement, where both should be seen as allies and not competitors, and when used correctly, significant results can be achieved, through ethical education that allows looking towards new scenarios and postulating attitudes of conduct that tend towards good.

“Teachers and students are experiencing a new reality in which they sometimes don’t know exactly how to react. There are many teachers who don’t know what type of activity to implement to prevent students from cheating and students don’t identify how to act, for example, articulating two lines without help,” the teacher highlighted.

The researcher stated that AI writes essays, answers questions, fills out exams, analyzes texts and graphics, poems and more. Teachers evaluate specific and fundamental skills and students put into practice the knowledge acquired in the training processes. “Ethics is the answer. We need an ethical education that prepares students to face novel situations and to reflect, to identify with their principles. Teachers and students still have the opportunity to channel educational practice in the right direction despite generative artificial intelligence,” Santana informed.

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Soriano highlighted that the task now is more ethical than merely pedagogical. Fostering education with values and committing ourselves to making students see whether or not to use artificial intelligence to do their homework is a personal decision and therefore, the student is responsible for the consequences that may arise. “Many of the post-graduation failures are not due to the lack of job openings or the experience dilemma, but to low competitiveness in the labor market. Training at a university implies demonstrating a high level of responsibility for one’s own training and showing that in practice it is not wrong to use AI, what is wrong is to use it dishonestly and to the detriment of one’s own training,” the researcher pointed out. Educational models like DaVinci, a precursor to Chat GPT, Gemini, Bard, among others, make mistakes when it comes to refined, subtle, and specialized knowledge, due to the technical training method by obligation that limits them. “We must integrate the use of generative AI in classrooms as a personalized accompaniment resource, questioning it, because only in this way will we achieve correct and meaningful use in the academic community,” said Soriano.

When questioned about the use of the tool in pre-university education and schools, the speaker emphasized the need to reflect a little more on the demands presented by the secondary level and the openness of AI, stating that as far as possible and based on the reality that the teacher is experiencing in the classroom, measures such as integrating the tool into the classroom process and using it as a consultation are beneficial in student learning.

Similarly, his recommendations regarding the skills demanded by the curriculum in primary education are the evaluation of reality and the outlining of strategies applicable to that reality, because through the capacities, educational processes are developed and values that respond to the good practice of ethics are instilled. “AI is an ally. We must consult concepts with it and socialize them in the classroom. There will always be challenges and new discoveries. Education should not be repetitive; instead of books, there is now Chat GPT. Parents also have a share of responsibility in this process. We must involve them and train students as they truly deserve: a quality education, like the one ISFODOSU implements,” concluded the researcher. This exhibition was held within the framework of the 4th Student Congress of Educational Research, an annual event with which ISFODOSU actively involves its students to stimulate their skills and abilities for research.